It was a cool, muggy day. My mother had set me up with a blind date, a girl that she worked with at Security Benefit Life. We were planning a night of Scrabble and general revelry until the girl called and said that there were tornado watches out, she wanted to stay at home. I was not really anxious to meet this girl anyway (I was still very, very shy), and I'd had a hard day at the hospital where I was going to X-ray school. Regardless, I decided that the girl was a wuss. We lived in the bottom half of an old residence at eighth and Polk. Our landlady and her daughter, Florence and Ethel White, lived upstairs, and we played scrabble and cards with them frequently. When the sirens started to blow, I packed them, my mother and my elderly dog into the basement and made them hide under a table. Then I went upstairs to see what I could see. It was raining torrentially. I was soaked, but I could hear the tornado and I wanted to see it. The rain suddenly stopped; I looked to the south and I could see things flying horizonally. I kept looking up further, and I was still seeing things flying. I looked directly overhead: same thing. I decided that I should join the ladies in the basement. And I fell flat on my back in the mud, still staring straight up. I couldn't move or even yell. After about three seconds that seemed like ten minutes, I picked myself up and wobbled to the basement, closing the door behand me. In about ten minutes, we felt like it was safe and opened the door. We were very lucky... the house was still there, only peripheral damage; limbs blown down, stuff like that. I hopped into my car and went to the hospital, and spent the night holding flashlights for surgeons sewing people up and generally making myself useful. We didn't take very many x-rays because most of the injuries that we saw were from flying glass and other objects. I spent most of the night there, then went to find my friend Ginny who lived by central park on Lincoln and 14th, an area that I had heard was pretty well leveled. I couldn't drive past twelfth street, so I left my car and went on foot with a flashlight. There was debris and downed power lines and glass everywhere; I couldn't get any further than the south end of the park. I gave up and went home. I knew that none of the fatalities had been from her family, so I was a little relieved about that. Finally I made it over to her house the next day. They were all OK, they hid in the basement while the tornado just barely missed them. There was a two-by-four impalling the divan where her grandfather had been sitting before the sirens went off. The house was totaled, but the roof was intact and they lived in it for the next few days. Tornados are scary. People in Topeka have panicked every time the sirens blow for 30 years now; Many people are terrified with every thundertorm. There are some horrible stories, and some wonderful stories, associated with this storm. In the days following the storm, Bob Mast (Who later married Ginny) and I took a lot of pictures of the damage. We were working for the Pictorial-Times, a weekly paper. Bob had a full-time job there, and I just kinda hung around with Bob on his assignments. The Pictorial printed a really nice book on the storm, but the last one that I had disappeared some years ago. Quite a few of the pictures that we took were in the book, I wish I still had it. I hope to never again see such destruction.